Help!!

I've decided to sit back for a while and let my human do the talking on this blog. I think that her writing as if she can read my thoughts is just becoming too much, poor thing, so I've decided to let her write down her own thoughts, I promise to jump in if it becomes too boring! :)

So there you have it - don't we all wish we could speak for our animals! Probably a good thing we don't always have a direct line, we might not always like what they would have to say - after all, they probably know us better than some of the humans we share our lives with!

I'm going to try a different format for a while and see how that develops! Little Ms Abbey and her sister and brothers will still be the stars of their own blog but I'd like to add a few bits and pieces in to spice things up a bit!

The last couple of weeks have been quite busy with some really exciting develpments that have finally started happening in our lives. For years now we've spoken about buying a little place in Portugal, the idea being that one day (God willing!) we will be able to follow the sun and spend half the year in Cape Town and the other half in Portugal. Well, it finally seems to be happening - we're busy getting all the paperwork done and hopefully we'll soon be the proud owners of our very own place in the beautiful city of Lagos!

Lagos is situated in the Western Algarve, down in the southern part of the country. If you'd like to get an idea of what the town and surrounding area looks like, click here. It will be a good couple of years till we can actually split our year in half like that but until such time, we'll now have a homebase there for a week or two every year. To say that I'm super excited is an understatement!

I'm truly looking forward to the new friendships, new language and exploring that lies ahead! What made Portugal even more attractive is that there is no quarantine period for the dogs. So they'll be able to travel with us when we do go over for longer periods - fantastic!

Anyway - fingers crossed that all works out. I hope to take you along on our first trip, hopefully that will still happen this year!

Back to my doggies. I'm at my wits end right now. For the last couple of years little Ms Chloe, our 5 year old Yorkie, has suffered from terrible skin allergies. We have not been able to pinpoint the exact cause but we suspect it's environmental with chicken meat as a very close second runner up as the possible culprit. We're trying a process of elimination right now and she's on Royal Canin's Hypoallergenic food at the moment. For the last two weeks I have added a new product, marketed here as Barf4Dogs, to their diet. To find out more about this product, click here.

We started off with the chicken (mixed with the Royal Canin) and her skin rashes are worse than ever. So at this stage chicken is suspect number one in my book. All the dogs, except Princess Abbey, love the new food, so the problem becomes multi faceted now! They normally take turns eating out of the same bowl - you can put ten bowls out for them, they'll still all line up in front of one dish, each patiently awaiting his/her turn!

As I have spoken to people who have had wonderful results with their pets allergies after putting them on this raw food diet, I have decided I'm not going to give up on it yet. I'm going to try the beef and venison version from next week on - if there is no difference after about a month, well, then we're back to square one.

For the time being Chloe has had yet another series of injections and is on a course of tablets for another week. I just feel that it's enough now! I don't want her to have to deal with more medication if we can help it. Not only is it really costly but more importantly, it can't be good for her in the long run! We have two really wonderful vets but if I can somehow find a solution that excludes serious medication, I'll be over the moon!

So, my dear pet-blogger friends, can anyone offer any suggestions? Perhaps you've had to deal with a similiar problem and found a solution - I will really appreciate hearing from you!